


sweet and heady

by anothernonstop



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Friends to Lovers, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-05-07 02:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14661633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothernonstop/pseuds/anothernonstop
Summary: It takes Johnny and Jaehyun a long time to figure out what they really are to each other. Eleven years, to be exact.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello, welcome, feel free to make yourself comfortable because this is going to be a long haul
> 
> i’m tagging for themes/people/pairings that show up in later chapters, just so you know what you’re getting into! title is from "lilac wine" by jeff buckley.
> 
> if you’re reading this i love you <3

Years 1-8 are a blur, if Jaehyun is being honest. He remembers being strapped into the backseat of a car, lost somewhere on the outskirts of the city, his dad leaning out the driver’s side window to ask toll booth attendants for directions. Before Google Maps, the streetlights hurrying across the planes of his face lulling him to sleep. A route that scurried away from the firm touch of a fingertip on a paper atlas, hiding and hissing in a corner, unwilling to be captured and understood. 

Jaehyun has memories of this time that he can’t differentiate from fantasy. Friends from the neighborhood nimbly skating atop thick ice manicured into a perfect oval in his backyard. Awoken from a nightmare, unidentified faces contorting and threatening in the darkness reflected in his bedroom window. The shade of red in holly bushes, transplanted by his mind to smear across the sidewalks when he skins his knee, to trace images on the walls where he doesn’t dare to draw. 

Everything before the third grade is abstract, like a Jackson Pollock painting he’s had explained to him a hundred times but still looks senseless. It’s all just conceptual, divorced from a distinct anchor. Poignant, sure, but ultimately meaningless. 

When he turns eight and starts school later that fall, it starts with a shirt, of all things. All Jaehyun remembers of third grade is writing his name on a laminated name tag, once and then tracing it again, and again, until it’s bold and sure. His name, written by him. An identity, sealed in with plastic and permanent marker that smells like peroxide, like injuries. 

He remembers a classmate, exuberant and bright-eyed. He was so fast-moving that Jaehyun remembers being afraid of his evasiveness, his uncompromising independence, even then. Jaehyun was a shy kid. The kind who hid his face behind his mother’s pant leg in preschool and flinched away from relatives leaning in to plant wet kisses on his cheeks. 

Johnny was not. 

Johnny’s shirt was bright red with dinosaurs stamped all over it: brontosauruses chomping on leaves, t-rexes open-mouthed and roaring silently. The shirt matched the boy; chaotic, bold, blurry as he dashed around the classroom. 

Jaehyun sat meekly in his hard plastic chair, watching the first day festivities swirl around him. A twig tossed in whitewater. 

Before their teacher calls the class to order, Jaehyun looks around him at all the other kids screeching with excitement. He’s new to this elementary school and doesn’t know anyone yet. He’s gotten a couple of inquisitive stares from students who don’t recognize him from previous years, but no hi-who-are-you’s yet. His new house is still stacked with boxes, everything about the past month unfamiliar and intimidating. He yearns for just one friendly face to talk to, to tell about his summer.

He taps Johnny on the shoulder, hardly waits for him to turn around before saying “I really like your shirt.” 

It’s utterly out of character. Jaehyun watches Johnny blink and is seized by an anxiety that’s beyond his years. He imagines Johnny laughing at him, shoving earthworms into his lunchbox, cornering him in a corner of the playground none of the teachers can see. Tropes he’s picked up from cartoons where the characters he relates to are the ones whose pockets are turned inside out for lunch money.

A smile splits Johnny’s face in two. “Thanks! I’m Johnny.” 

After that, they’re inseparable.

~*~

They get paired together for the science fair and Johnny finds himself in Jaehyun’s basement surrounded by poster board and markers. Their project is about dolphins; Jaehyun meticulously draws kelp growing out of the ocean floor and bubbles flowing out of fishes’ mouths. 

Johnny pages through a library book and breaks their focused silence. “This says that dolphins feel like hard-boiled eggs.”

Jaehyun perks up. “We should bring in an egg for people to touch!”

Johnny assesses Jaehyun’s painstaking artwork, the way the dolphin fact animates his whole face. “You’re weird,” he declares. “I like you.” 

The day of the science fair, parents mill around the gym where everyone’s projects are on display. Jaehyun stands beside their poster board, encouraging everyone to feel the smoothness of the egg, informing them that dolphins make those squealing noises to communicate with each other and that they’re “super smart! Their brains are kind of like ours.” 

Johnny and Jaehyun get a prize ribbon just like everyone else who participated, but Jaehyun still treats it like a high accolade. 

“We did it!” He beams at Johnny, who beams back, knowing that most of the work was Jaehyun’s. 

“No, you did. Congrats,” Johnny pulls their ribbon off the board and hands it to Jaehyun. “You should keep this.” 

Jaehyun takes it reluctantly but gratefully. He features it clearly in his room, pinned to the corkboard full of photos developed from disposable cameras. 

Johnny ends up in Jaehyun’s basement a lot more after their science project is done. They click through cartoons on the TV and play unskilled games on the ping-pong table no one else in the house ever uses. It’s their little sanctuary, left undisturbed except for the occasional snack delivery from Jaehyun’s parents. 

Johnny wishes they could stay there together always, shirking their responsibilities at school. He’d much rather be laughing at Jaehyun’s running commentary on the shows they watch than listening to teachers drone on about water cycles and long division. 

Technically, they spend more time apart than they do together in Jaehyun’s basement or in Johnny’s backyard or on the playground at recess, but it feels like the reverse. The structure of childhood keeps them carefully regulated, 7 hours together at school, the occasional playdate, and the rest of their time spent accumulating stories. But the times when they have each other to themselves just feel more real, more memorable. 

They both tap their toes through the school day, itching for fresh air and for the tradition they’ve established at recess: Jaehyun telling tall tales for Johnny, his rapt audience of one. Jaehyun is quiet, but his imagination is bursting, occupying every inch of real estate his little body has to offer. He and Johnny sit in the mulch, still panting from games of kickball, and Jaehyun creates extravagant works of fiction. He tells Johnny about the shimmery spirit that reclines on his roof; sometimes he can see it waiting there when his school bus pulls into the neighborhood. He says one night he was watching Star Wars and an ewok crawled out of his TV and onto his living room rug. Sometimes, when he wakes up in the middle of the night, the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling start rearranging themselves. And Johnny is always fascinated. It doesn’t matter whether he’s gullible enough to believe Jaehyun. All that matters is that he thinks the stories are thrilling, is captivated by the way Jaehyun punctuates his speech with wild hand gestures and comical expressions. 

Johnny always looks forward to Jaehyun’s storytelling, and Jaehyun looks forward to Johnny’s enthusiasm, his sparkly eyes. The fog of early morning is anticipatory. They keep their ears perked for the sound of the school bus grumbling several streets away, quietly contemplate the vapor flowing from car tailpipes in the bitter cold. All of these things mean it’s almost time for them to sit down at their shared table group and doodle notes to each other in the margins of their loose-leaf paper. 

Their friendship makes sense. Both boys have too much energy, have an affinity for the outlandish, and are incorrigibly cheerful. But they’re not quite the same. Johnny is a little more unguarded and it’s easier for him to make friends. Something about him comforts people before they even know they need to be comforted. During group assignments, he conjures laughter even when they’re all grouchy, frustrated by the teacher’s tedious instructions. When he and Jaehyun part ways at the end of the day, he always boards a bus full of kids who happily move their backpacks into their laps so he can sit with them. 

Jaehyun notices this. He notices most things. He gets along with his classmates easily too; his dimply smile and goofy sense of humor serve him well. He’s just more reserved than Johnny is, more hesitant to raise his voice or approach people who haven’t invited him. He prefers to float on the margins, magnetic but cautious.

Jaehyun is just happy that Johnny keeps choosing him. He leaves rowdy groups on the basketball court to come sit with Jaehyun at recess. When he gets invited to birthday parties, his RSVP depends on whether Jaehyun was invited too. The whole school understands them to be a package deal; where one is, the other isn’t far. 

They become so close that the days when they don’t see each other at all begin to feel unnatural. Snow days and teacher work days and holidays are fun but strange in the other’s absence. 

They wake up at 5 AM on winter mornings, giddy, running into their living rooms to turn on the morning news. They search for the telltale letters of their county name on the ticker tape across the bottom of the screen. Parallel snow days, lived the same way, only apart. 

They crunch through the snow in their yards, boots heavy on their small feet. Shake the white off the bushes just to see the green persisting underneath. 

Jaehyun tells Johnny about the perfect sledding hill close by his house. Johnny surveys the cramped yards lining his street and all the neighborhood kids who are fun, but aren’t Jaehyun. He wants to go sledding with Jaehyun on that perfect hill and then go back to his house to play ping-pong in the basement.

Johnny politely asks his parents if they can move into Jaehyun’s neighborhood. They rudely decline.

~*~

Jaehyun is more superstitious than Johnny is. He holds his breath when his parents drive past cemeteries, refuses to play Bloody Mary at slumber parties, and believes there’s a ghost inhabiting his house.

He always seems a little more unsettled when they sit cross-legged in the supernatural section of the school library, working their way through the scariest books they can find. There’s one book they always return to. They’ve memorized its precise location on the shelf, the precise color of its spine. They warily eye the illustrations of hazy phantoms, disembodied hands, clawed creatures creeping up staircases.

“Are you scared?” Johnny asks. 

Jaehyun denies being affected at all, claims “no, no. I’m just. Really interested in ghosts.” 

But after they’ve both been tucked into bed in their own homes, they lay wide awake, visualizing the illustrations of spirits and beasts. Even Johnny thinks that if he stares straight ahead long enough, he can see a door that doesn’t existing opening into his room, something unwelcome filtering out.

Johnny finally swallows his pride. He tells Jaehyun about the night terrors he used to get years ago. When he was four or five, every so often he woke up the whole house with shrieks, thrashing in tangled sheets, trapped in the cage of sleep face-to-face with his fear. He says “thinking about the book feels kinda like that except I’m awake.” 

“Maybe we should look at other stuff. That one scares me too.” 

Years down the line, they’ll go back to the elementary school library and hunt for it, for old time’s sake. But the librarian took it off the shelf. Turns out the school had gotten complaints and decided it was too disturbing to keep around.

In the dark, together and apart, sometimes they still get half-remembered glimpses of the stories in that book. Get a rush of the now-stale fear they felt thumbing through the pages together. Believer and skeptic. 

~*~

Johnny knows it’s really autumn when he wakes up to hot chocolate on the kitchen table. Eventually, the days melt into ice, linoleum floor freezing against his feet. Johnny has too much energy for the winter; he makes the whole house vibrate with restlessness. He runs around on the hardwood floor in stocking feet until he slips and falls. He jumps up and down on the couch cushions, imagining a trampoline propelling him up toward the ceiling. But nothing measures up to the freedom of outside with the trees and the sun and the whole street under his dominion.

So spring is solace. He even likes the rain that dampens the fluffy blooms of the mimosa tree in his backyard. 

But Jaehyun is terrified of the thunderstorms that start plaguing the region in the springtime. They’re in his room, sunset a faint stamp on their memories. The first rumble of thunder is innocuous; it still sounds like it could be a storm sneaking around the corners of the town limits, not quite ready to pounce. 

But Jaehyun already looks washed out from fear when Johnny glances over. He remembers Jaehyun telling him that he’s scared of storms, but this is the first time he’s been around to see it. 

“My mom is from the South.” Jaehyun says. “I saw a tornado there when we visited my grandma and I don’t want us to have one of those here.” He’s looking out past the door of his bedroom, frowning in the pale light cast by the thunderheads. “I think my house is haunted.” Jaehyun says it conspiratorially, but he’s wringing his hands at the same time. 

Johnny smiles, keeps deliberating over the Super Mario menu screen on his Nintendo. “OK.” 

“It is, I swear.” Another, louder, clap of thunder shoots a volt of electricity up his spine. “A few nights ago, I saw a lady walking down the hall.” 

“Sounds like it was your mom.” 

“It wasn’t.” Jaehyun is insistent, determined for Johnny to believe him. “She was walking weird. Like really slow. And her hair was longer than my mom’s.” 

The thunder is getting louder, making the floor quake beneath them. Johnny puts away his game. 

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Jaehyun asks him. 

Johnny shrugs. “I dunno. I’m scared of them though.” 

Lightning spits its jagged light into the room. They peer out into the hallway, uncertain. The walls seem to shift with the dim shadows, slow-walking women intent and invisible. 

“Uh. Do we have to sleep in here tonight?” 

They don’t. They tiptoe down the hallway, blankets draped over their shoulders and trailing behind them like regal trains. They curl up in a corner of Jaehyun’s parents’ room, typing messages to each other on their game consoles and flinching just a little less when the thunder strikes. 

Johnny: “sounds like its going away” 

Jaehyun: “finaly” 

Jaehyun: “thanks for not making fun of me when i was scared” 

They survive the night unscathed. The storms in the following weeks are mild, not as bone-shaking as the first one of the spring. But later that season, a tropical storm sweeps up the coast. The meteorologists underestimate the severity, tell residents of the area to be cautious, to stay inside, but it’ll ultimately just be a lot of rain. 

Johnny is at Jaehyun’s house when it hits. Rain slams against the roof in solid sheets, sluicing the sidewalks. The wind starts speaking in tongues, bending tree branches like fake plastic. 

They’re wide-eyed, remembering the thunderstorm last spring and the ghost story that came along with it. 

They’ve established an unspoken permission to be scared this time. Johnny tentatively grabs Jaehyun’s hand when they hear the snap of old wood outside. 

“It’s okay, at least I’m here.” Johnny pulls his shoulders back and puffs out his chest, hauling a laugh out of Jaehyun’s throat. 

“Thank goodness,” Jaehyun says. And he’s only half-kidding. 

~*~

Johnny and Jaehyun have a knack for getting in trouble together. They follow along easily with each other’s ill-fated ideas, consequences a distant blip on the horizon. They embolden each other, their personalities heightened by close proximity. 

One recess, Jaehyun’s out of new stories to tell, so they walk around and around the track, working off the pent-up energy from sitting still for so many hours at a time. When he gets tired of the repetition, Johnny throws himself into the grass, back propped up against a chain-link fence. 

“I’m bored,” he announces. 

Jaehyun doesn’t respond, just laces his fingers through the openings in the fence next to Johnny, rests his feet a few inches off the ground. 

Johnny rises to join him in his miniature ascent. It’s better than sitting there tearing apart the stems of dandelions. They’re about two feet off the ground when a teacher from another class bellows, her voice carrying all the way across the blacktop, the playground, and the kickball field to where Johnny and Jaehyun are barely above the grass. They look at each other in confusion.

“Is she talking to us?” 

The teacher keeps yelling incomprehensible commands, pointing in their general direction. They imagine they can see her face turning pink from all these many yards away. Johnny steps down off the fence and starts slinking across the field. 

“Guess we should go over there,” he says. Jaehyun is defiant. The whole walk to their disciplinary fate, he insists on the unfairness of it all. They weren’t doing anything wrong, this teacher is a witch. He keeps his arms crossed while she chastises them, eyes downcast. She writes them notes detailing the ‘incident’ and tells them they need to bring them back signed by their parents.

Johnny could swear he remembers seeing other kids climb up that fence, further than he and Jaehyun went, and they didn’t get sent home with stern notes in their backpacks. 

It seems like their closeness makes them stand out. It makes them feel like the teachers keep a closer eye on them than on anyone else, waiting for them to stir up mischief. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; because they can sense the harsher scrutiny, they’re tempted to test the boundaries. Jaehyun hangs upside-down on the monkey bars, the way all the teachers have told them not to, when he thinks no one is watching. Johnny brings his Game Boy to school, plays video games during science lessons with his hands stuck inside his desk. 

And they’re caught almost every time. They both learn what the inside of the principal’s office looks like and ignore all their scoldings. They smirk at each other after authority figures have finished telling them why their actions are bad, and distracting, and unacceptable. They both think everyone is overreacting. After all, both of them are studious enough that they get good marks on their report cards and keep up with all of their lessons with ease (well, maybe except math). 

By the time they reach their final year of elementary school, they’re notorious for their friendship, their talent for stirring up trouble, and their inexplicably good academic performances. They baffle the teachers. But none of that matters to Johnny and Jaehyun. They’re just happy to be in the same class, and excited to graduate to middle school where there are big soccer fields and wider hallways to speed through.

~*~

It feels like perfect symmetry when they go on a field trip to the aquarium in the fifth grade. Their friendship was kindled by their dolphin science fair project, and now the end of elementary school brings them here, only glass keeping them from real-life dolphins and their hard-boiled egg skin. It’s the final event before summer sends them all reeling in different directions: summer camps and vacations and, for some, summer school.

There’s something surreal about aquariums, with their blackened walkways and domes of bright blue. It’s like being engulfed, like being cradled in a world they don’t belong in. A world they couldn’t survive in. 

Jaehyun and Johnny dangle their arms over the railing by the stingray pool, resisting trying to dip their fingers beneath the water’s surface to skim across the creatures’ smooth backs. They’re good at getting into trouble together, but something about being here makes them reverent, restrained. 

Jaehyun’s favorite exhibit is the one with the poison dart frogs. He ooh’s and ah’s over each one, describing their colors and patterns as though Johnny can’t see them for himself. Johnny personally prefers the sharks, but he does like hearing new things about the frogs from Jaehyun. 

“Did you know they’re colorful so other animals don’t eat them? Did you know they only come out during the daytime? Did you know the blue one doesn’t go in the water? 

When Jaehyun gets excited about something, he gets really excited. His whole body reacts, bouncing on his feet, waving his hands, eyes darting around and never landing on just one thing.

It happens again when they visit the gift shop. Jaehyun rushes immediately to a stuffed spotted seal resting on a shelf with dozens of other fuzzy renderings of aquatic life. Its head is a perfect circle, the beads of its eyes lightened by the pink smile stitched across its face.

“It’s so cute.” Jaehyun’s face is impossibly soft, his hands gentle as he handles the toy, treating it as though it’s alive.

“You should buy it!” Johnny is encouraging, notices that the seal has roused Jaehyun’s dimples, extra smiles carved into his cheeks.

He pouts. “My parents didn’t give me money for the gift shop.” 

Johnny wishes he had the money to buy the seal for Jaehyun. He contemplates trying to sneak it into his backpack but knows that he would get caught if he did, no matter how good his intentions. He’s too easy to read, like a kid who steals from the cookie jar only to be given away by the chocolate smeared all over their face.

They leave the aquarium empty-handed, but Jaehyun still looks content, recounting the trip during the bus ride back. 

“Remember the shark tank? What if the glass had just – boom! – broken? The turtles were so big, I didn’t know they were that big in real life!” 

Johnny smiles back at him amicably, his memories of the trip amplified by Jaehyun’s excitement. He thinks everything is made more acute, livelier, when Jaehyun is around. 

“I’m just glad we got to see the dolphins!” And on that, they can both agree. 

~*~

Summer has always been Johnny’s favorite. In the summertime, it’s easier to convince his parents to let him sleep over at Jaehyun’s house. Easier to convince Jaehyun’s parents to drop him off at Johnny’s house on hot weekend mornings. And the summertime is bright like him, eager to grow into something burning, intense. 

Their last summer before middle school, they stretch out on the driveway, the sun still tepid but gathering momentum. They grasp thick cylinders of chalk between their fingers, draw rough sketches of landscapes they’ve learned about in history lessons. Mount St. Helens spitting pink smoke. The Lincoln Memorial in imprecise two dimension. The Sears Tower stretching resolutely, curved from the divots in the pavement. 

Johnny may seem bolder, more talkative, less controlled than Jaehyun. But it’s usually Jaehyun who dreams up their adventures. Johnny’s street is just a steep hill and Jaehyun talks him into riding his bike downhill with no hands. 

“It feels like flying” Jaehyun says. And that does sound pretty tempting. 

Johnny only lets go for a second, hands still hovering over the handlebars, waiting to lose his balance, determined to avoid the raspberry ooze of scraped knees. The houses whip past, the colors of the shutters just ribbons in his peripheral vision. 

When he finally rolls to a stop in front of a beaming Jaehyun he says “there. I did it.” He’s not sure why he feels winded; he didn’t need to pedal at all. Maybe it’s exhilaration. 

“Yeah, barely” Jaehyun teases. “I’ll have to be your teacher so you can do it better next time.” 

By now, the day has condensed into mirage. Ripples shivering above the street like water disturbed by pebbles. 

It’s Jaehyun who breaks first. 

“I want something cold.” 

So they sit on the backyard deck, elbows sticky sweet with popsicle syrup. Bumblebees circle around them in curious dances and the sun doggedly heats up the skin on the backs of their necks.

“My dad found a snake out here a couple weeks ago” Johnny mentions. “It was over there, by the fence.” 

“Woah.” Jaehyun looks as impressed as he can while trying to keep melted popsicle from dripping onto his knees. “Did he kill it?” 

“No, I did.” 

Jaehyun looks doubtful. It’s not difficult to tell when Johnny is lying; he’s too honest for his own good. He can’t fib successfully to save his own life, his open, trusting face giving everything away. 

“No, you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t.” Johnny’s grinning, good-humored even when Jaehyun won’t entertain his tall tales the way he entertains Jaehyun’s. Johnny thinks Jaehyun is altogether better at telling stories than him. And definitely a little braver. “I bet you would’ve though.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things are Happening

Middle school isn’t the earth-shattering transition they expected it to be. Mostly Johnny is just happy to have a locker to store his stuff in, and Jaehyun is happy to be in almost all the same classes as Johnny. 

They don’t get recess anymore, but Jaehyun still tells stories at lunchtime. He likes reading Greek myths and relaying them back to Johnny, who only retains about half of it, head spinning from all the confusing names. They still spend weekends together whenever they can, and pass notes on jagged pieces of notebook paper.

Yuta is a change though. 

Johnny knew Yuta first, they’re in the same English class and Johnny took a shine to him when he could recite William Carlos Williams’ plums-in-the-icebox poem off the top of his head. 

They’re an unlikely pair, on the surface. Johnny has grown out of his troublemaking from elementary school, or at least he’s gotten better at charming his way out of consequences. The charisma that has always drawn his classmates to him seems to work better on adults now that he’s learned the right smile to use when he’s caught scribbling on the wall at the back of the classroom or folding up paper airplanes. When he sees a teacher glowering at him, he schools his features into sweet innocence, calmly explaining that he’s just testing his pen, or he’s just making himself a nametag. The teachers don’t necessarily buy his excuses, but he seems like a good enough kid that they let him off easy. 

Yuta, on the other hand. Yuta is intense and willful. He more or less does what he wants. He violates the dress code with chains laced through his belt loops. He’s the smartest person Johnny’s ever met, but he only turns in his homework when he feels like it, sneering when teachers ask why he didn’t complete his assignments. He likes to mutter jabs at those teachers under his breath when they turn their backs, never quite quiet enough for them not to hear. By the time his big, pretty smile comes out, it’s too late to evade punishment. 

Yuta spends his afternoons in detention while Johnny plays saxophone at band practices. Yuta loves moody rock music while Johnny listens to soft acoustic pop songs. Johnny’s jokes are outlandish performances; Yuta’s humor is more dry and subtle. And yet, they’re fast friends. 

On weekends when his workload is light and Jaehyun is busy, Johnny spends time over at Yuta’s house, lounging on his bed and admiring the collages of band posters plastered across the walls. They watch B-grade horror films together, munch on whatever questionable combinations of snack food are sitting in Yuta’s pantry, and Yuta introduces Johnny to his chinchilla named Takoyaki. “My favorite food,” he explains, as though that’s a valid excuse for naming a fluffy rodent after a ball of octopus. 

“Don’t worry, he won’t bite,” Yuta assures.

Johnny wriggles his fingertips between the metal of the cage, and Takoyaki promptly bites him. He doesn’t approach the lump of fur after that, just watches it arrogantly stride around its cage while he and Yuta enjoy their lazy afternoon.

Yuta’s neighborhood is more conducive to walking than Johnny’s is; if Johnny wants to walk on his own street he has to stop to have conversations with the little old woman who lives two doors down and brings homemade cookies to his house at Christmastime. He has to fend off little kids riding their scooters in the middle of the road to avoid being roped into whatever game they’re playing. But Yuta’s neighborhood is quiet, houses spaced further apart and populated by busier, less talkative people.

On an autumn day, Yuta drags Johnny out his front door, announces that he wants to show him something. They’ve spent the day laying on Yuta’s bedroom floor, Yuta plucking idly at the strings of a guitar he has no idea how to work. “I’m going to teach myself how to play” he told Johnny. Johnny thinks he should learn how to tune the thing first. 

It’s overcast and Johnny is mildly concerned that it’ll start raining as Yuta leads him deeper into the forest behind his house. Leaves crunch underfoot and the trees crackle with all their unshed color. A breeze slithers over them and Johnny rubs his hands up and down his arms, trying futilely to push his goosebumps back beneath his skin. 

They finally emerge into a clearing that looks far too big to be natural. Untamed grass stretches languidly in endless swathes and geese noisily pass in V’s above them. It’s not until he catches sight of a red flag waving limply on a lopsided pole that he realizes this is what used to be a golf course. 

“Pretty cool, right?” Yuta takes a seat at the very edge of the tree line with his elbows on his knees. “I like to come here and think.” 

“Yeah.” Johnny sits beside him, eyes scanning the trees on the other side of the clearing. “How’d you find this place?” 

“I just kinda found it one day. My mom was pissed at me about something and everything sucked so I took a really long walk out here. 

“Wow.” Johnny can appreciate that kind of frustration. The kind that makes it seem like the smallest thing is the end of the whole world. The kind that fills you up to the brim, far past the actual proportions of the problem. “This does seem like a good thinking spot.” 

“You know, I’ve never brought anyone here before.” Yuta says it like it genuinely just occurred to him. “Don’t tell anyone about it though. I don’t want the only peaceful spot around to get all,” he waves his hand vaguely, “people-y”. Johnny can’t help but feel like Yuta tacked on that last bit to lighten the weight of his vulnerability. Yuta can be hard-shelled and prickly sometimes, self-defensive even when he’s safe. 

“Oh. Well thanks for bringing me here.” Johnny puts as much sincerity into his voice as he can. He’s careful with Yuta. No one would think he is judging by his boisterous exterior, but Johnny is perceptive. He can tell that Yuta struggles, despite his mask of indifference. The teachers at school slapped a target on his back at the first sign of trouble and now it seems he can’t win anyone’s favor. Everyone acts like they’re giving up on him and he’s only twelve years old. It strikes Johnny as unjust as all hell. Friendship with Yuta doesn’t come as easily as his friendship with Jaehyun, he has to work even harder for Yuta’s trust. “I would never tell anyone, of course.” 

Yuta looks relieved and it makes Johnny’s chest hurt. 

They leave the golf course when it starts drizzling and Johnny bids a bitter farewell to Takoyaki when they get back to Yuta’s house. He leaves with a new mix CD in his pocket; Yuta tells him to give it to Jaehyun. “If you want me to be friends with him too, tell him he has to listen to this first. I will not be friends with two people who only listen to that pop shit.” 

Johnny has already informed Yuta that he and Jaehyun are a package deal. He’s been planning to introduce them for a few weeks now, he’s just been waiting for the right opportunity. He laughs where he stands on Yuta’s doorstep, waving the jewel CD case in the air. 

“Thanks, I’ll let him know!” He’s just glad Yuta understands that his friendship with Jaehyun means that they don’t just share thoughts and answers on homework assignments, but also friends. Besides, he’s certain that his two favorite people are bound to hit it off. 

~*~

Johnny is right; Jaehyun and Yuta are surprisingly compatible. Jaehyun’s tendency to be reserved around new people mixes well with Yuta’s own wariness. They understand each other, and Johnny watches happily as they bond over the tracks Jaehyun likes on Yuta’s weird mix CD and begin waiting together by Johnny’s locker before he gets to school. 

Yuta is a mess of contractions: wild and aloof at the same time. Jaehyun is pretty contradictory himself: shy and warm, goofy and deliberate, clumsy and careful. 

Johnny and Jaehyun both get to see a side of Yuta that other people don’t see, or don’t want to see. And they’re grateful for that. 

By the time February rolls around, it’s a given that Jaehyun will invite Yuta to celebrate his birthday. And again the year after that. 

Jaehyun’s fourteenth birthday party is a success; his house buzzes with excitement until everyone leaves but Johnny and Yuta, who plan to sleep over. There’s just one hitch: no one’s parents trust Yuta. Within earshot of Jaehyun’s mom, he talks about the Danish foreign exchange students who had shown up at school the past week. Sly smile on his face, Jaehyun shifting uncomfortably across from him, he recounts sneaking out of class to kiss some girl named Freja against the kiln in the art wing. He’s no good at self-censoring. Couldn’t care less that Mrs. Jung is across the room, tidying up the coffee table with her eyes narrowed in disapproval. 

Jaehyun’s parents think Yuta is a bad influence. Jaehyun doesn’t usually agree; he just listens to Yuta’s exploits, never quite brazen enough to participate himself. But later that night, with his lips against the opening of a hairspray bottle, he kind of sees his parents’ point. 

Yuta tells them he rescued the empty bottle from the trash in his mom’s bathroom, an inconspicuous vessel for the contents of whatever happened to be on the top shelf of his parents’ liquor cabinet.

Johnny brings the bottle up to his nose. It smells like rotten fruit and a hint of hairspray, clinging to the bottle in synthetic stubbornness. He recoils in disgust. “Oh god, what is that?” 

“It’s cognac and red wine.” Yuta doesn’t look bothered in the slightest, snatching the bottle from Johnny and taking an experimental sip. His face only contorts a little as the alcohol goes down, and he immediately reaches for a forkful of chocolate cake to chase it with. Jaehyun grimaces. He’d helped his mom with her delicate frosting decorations and he’s certain this is not what she had intended when she’d spent hours baking that morning.

“Just wash it down with chocolate cake!” Yuta grins obliviously, reassuringly at the other two, frosting coloring the corner of his mouth.

They drain the bottle together, growing rowdy, imitating the clumsy merriment they’ve seen on TV house parties. 

There’s not enough alcohol to get even one of them tipsy, but none of them knows what tipsy feels like. So they call the warmth of the liquid in the back of their throats intoxication. They use the bitter mixture as an excuse to loosen their mouths and their limbs.

“I have an idea.” Yuta seems to be full of ideas tonight. 

The idea is a game. One person puts a grape in their mouth, another person retrieves the grape with their mouth. “Simple,” says Yuta. 

They sneak upstairs from the privacy of the basement, tiptoeing around Jaehyun’s dad snoring on the living room couch. Illuminated by the dim blue light of the TV, Yuta pulls a bunch of grapes from the produce drawer. Back in the basement, he halves one, juice dripping down into the webs between his fingers. He holds one half out to Johnny, raising his eyebrows in encouragement. 

Johnny pops the fruit into his mouth, tucking it beneath his tongue. 

It feels like the game that it is when their mouths are together. They keep their own hands in their own laps. Johnny keeps his lips still and parted, too frightened to consider doing much else. Yuta’s tongue flits forward, chasing a purple half-moon. Johnny isn’t sure he likes the feeling. He knows he’s not supposed to like it. He feels the breath of Yuta’s giggle when the grape keeps resisting capture. 

Yuta makes a triumphant noise in the back of his throat when he finally flicks the grape back into his own mouth. He retreats right away, a glint in his eyes and no sign of sentiment. No blush on his cheeks, just a rapid chew and swallow. 

Johnny isn’t sure whether to classify this as his first kiss. He supposes it doesn’t matter to Yuta, who’s scrunching his nose and swiping his thumb across his bottom lip in a way that may have offended Johnny if he wasn’t so tempted to do the same. 

Yuta nods, hair flopping into his eyes, and turns to inform Jaehyun that “those are some pretty good grapes.” And that’s that. 

~*~

In light of the night’s events, Jaehyun isn’t even surprised when Yuta slides a pack of cigarettes out of the front pocket of his bag. They all sneak through the basement’s sliding glass door and walk down to the cul-de-sac where pavement carves a path into the forest. 

It’s one of those winter days that feels like late spring. Johnny half expects to see the early flickers of fireflies as he watches Yuta and Jaehyun walk down toward the creek. He’s had enough experimentation for the night. 

“They’re menthols” Yuta explains to Jaehyun, extracting the crumpled box and a lighter from the close hug of his jeans. “My friend Matt took them from his older brother’s room.” 

Jaehyun does not know Matt, has no reason to trust Matt. “What the hell is menthol?” 

“I dunno, makes it taste different or something.” 

The first time Jaehyun inhales, he keeps all the smoke in his mouth. Yuta looks at him from the corner of his eye and Jaehyun feels like he can tell he’s not doing it right. Everything with Yuta feels like a challenge. Yuta talks about how it feels to have his hands up girls’ shirts and he takes cigarette smoke all the way into his lungs. Jaehyun is too shy for careless kisses and too scared to smoke properly.

Jaehyun takes his second drag in earnest and it burns worse than the hairspray cognac. 

Johnny can hear him coughing all the way from where he stands on the other side of the foliage. He scoffs and kicks at a piece of loose gravel. He resolutely does not think about the grape game or about how both Yuta and Jaehyun’s mouths must taste like fumes now. 

~*~

It’s been hours since they passed the hairspray bottle around, long after the alcohol has faded from their systems. But they still maintain the pretense of drunkenness like a collective hallucination. 

It’s late and they’re all spread out across Jaehyun’s bed, trading the chill of the basement for the dark wood of Jaehyun’s room. Johnny’s playing music from his iPod’s earbuds at full volume, the tinny sound of a sad guitar filtering above their heads. 

They laugh as quietly as they can, mindful of Jaehyun’s parents asleep down the hall. 

Somewhere between complimenting Johnny on his playlist and giving in to the undertow of sleep, Yuta nudges Jaehyun and says, reckless, “hey, what if we kissed.” 

Jaehyun rolls his eyes, doesn’t even bother looking at Yuta. He says ridiculous things all the time and doesn’t usually intend to follow through. “Are you serious.” 

“Yeah.” Yuta pulls the corners of his mouth down as if to ask why not. 

Jaehyun tries again, a few times. Asking if Yuta is just making a joke, poised to embarrass Jaehyun if he says yes. 

It’s not until Yuta says, “sorry I asked, it was stupid” that Jaehyun turns on his side to face him. It’s not even that he wants to kiss Yuta. He mostly just wants to be able to say that he’s kissed somebody. 

The kiss lasts for all of a few seconds. Close-mouthed and lukewarm. Jaehyun is struck by the fact that it feels exactly how he expected it to feel. It doesn’t feel like firecrackers or like the horror stories he’s heard about overeager tongues. It’s just Yuta’s hand curled over his shoulder, the medicinal taste of Chapstick on Yuta’s lips. 

Johnny lays at the foot of the bed, barely daring to breathe. He absently wonders if they even remember he’s in the room. 

Yuta pulls away first, as if to make up for Jaehyun being the first to lean in. 

“See? Easy.” Yuta falls onto his back; arms behind his head, ankle resting against knee. 

Jaehyun nods nervously, still anticipating some punishing force. Maybe Yuta criticizing his kissing technique. Maybe some unseen eavesdropper bursting in to point out that he is a boy, that Yuta is a boy, that two boys are not supposed to share kisses in clothes that still smell of tobacco. But nothing comes. 

“You guys are crazy,” Johnny announces. He hopes it comes across like a dismissal. 

He’s feigning the nonchalance that comes so easily to Yuta. Johnny is too big in too many ways; it’s difficult for him to hide anything. He can’t hide the gangly sprawl of his limbs or the reactivity of his soft face. Right now, his soft face reads discomfort. Some bitter part of him wonders why his kiss was a game and Jaehyun’s was real. 

The thing is, Johnny has been thinking a lot lately. The kids at school have been pairing off, boy and girl. They recruit their friends to pass notes to their crushes during lessons, go on ‘dates’ where they walk aimlessly around the local mall. But Johnny doesn’t particularly want any of that. He notices himself sparing extra glances at other boys while they check their hair in bathroom mirrors, making sure they look presentable for the girls they like. He scrolls a little too attentively through the profile pictures of the guys whose looks have girls giggling in giddy groups. 

He’s started to feel self-conscious about changing in the locker room. Not because he lacks confidence, but because he doesn’t trust his eyes not to stray and get him into trouble. He’s caught himself thinking absently about kissing boys in the janitor’s closet in the five minutes between classes. It’s a thought he never invited and would prefer to evict from his mind, and then exterminate, and then set on fire just to be sure it won’t come back. It feels like the struggle against his blooming realization is almost physical sometimes. The muscles in his jaw tighten as he wills himself to think about anything other than how the boys track and field team looks when he passes by their practice on his way home after school, or how it would feel to cup another boy’s face in his hands.

His jaw is set tight now as Jaehyun and Yuta’s chests shake with laughter. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt less like laughing in his whole life. 

He’s not even sure why he’s so upset. He sleeps on the floor, leaves the bed to Jaehyun and Yuta, sourly thinking that they clearly don’t need him up there. He’s awake long after their breathing has evened out, mouth still tasting of wine and fresh fruit. Bittersweet.

~*~

One day, Yuta calls up Johnny on his landline, dancing excitedly around whatever issue couldn’t wait until school the next day. 

“Here’s a hint: it starts with a G.” 

“Uh.” Johnny wracks his brain, worried that whatever Yuta has to tell him is over his head, something mischievous Johnny isn’t edgy enough to guess. “Do you have a girlfriend?” 

“Not quite.” Johnny could swear he hears Yuta’s smile. 

Yuta keeps evading whatever secret he’s clutching onto until Johnny gets exasperated, exhales “just tell me.” 

“Okay, okay, fine.” There’s a pause and a deep breath. “I think I’m gay.” 

“Oh.” Johnny wasn’t prepared for this. He’s been too afraid to even think that word and here was Yuta, saying it out loud with the sun in his voice. “Shit. Oh. Well um. Congratulations? I guess?” 

“Is that okay with you?” Yuta sounds a little more tentative than he did before, now that the words have been spoken.

“Dude, of course!” Johnny pulls himself together. This isn’t about him. He’s proud of Yuta, wants him to feel supported and secure and happy. Something hopeful stirs inside him: Yuta is brave enough to call him up out of the blue, open and giddy. Maybe one day he’ll be brave like Yuta too. “I’m really happy for you, thanks for telling me.” 

“You’re the first to know.” 

Johnny is struck by the same feeling of specialness he felt when Yuta showed him the abandoned golf course. But there’s one question he can’t resist asking. “Uh, how did you know?” He feels selfish once it’s out there, knows he’s asking in hopes Yuta’s answer will help make sense of his own confusion. 

Yuta laughs. “I guess I kind of figured when I went to the homecoming game over at the high school and couldn’t stop staring at the quarterback’s ass.” That pulls a laugh out of Johnny too. It’s such a Yuta answer: smug and sardonic.

“So when you kissed Jaehyun…” 

“I was just testing it out, I guess.” 

“And you liked it?” 

“I mean, I liked it better than kissing girls, but I don’t think Jaehyun is really my type.” 

Johnny’s shoulders slacken, his lungs loosening from tight fists to open palms. He’s glad to hear that the kiss didn’t mean anything after all. Everything in him is too muddled, he doesn’t know how he would react to his two closest friends being together while he’s left twisted up in sailor’s knots. He’s still not sure how Jaehyun felt about it, he hasn’t dared to bring it up since. But Yuta’s answer alleviates the acid that had boiled in the pit of his stomach as he laid at the foot of Jaehyun’s bed, the odd one out of an impulsive kiss. 

Yuta thanks Johnny one last time, and his voice is tinted with relief, bravado giving way to something quieter, more raw. Johnny tells him there’s no reason to thank him. 

Their gratitude is mutual.

~*~

Right before the school year ends, Jaehyun’s dad takes him and Johnny on a hike, piloting the family’s dilapidated minivan out past their suburban town until everything is just moss and gray rock. 

Johnny was not informed that this hike would entail climbing a whole, honest-to-god mountain, but he pushes through anyway, dodging prickly branches and focusing on not rolling his ankle. When they’ve nearly reached the summit, arriving at a waterfall and a frigid pool beneath it, he wastes no time shedding his clothes and jumping in.

They’re at the stage in their life when they’ve got too much height and not enough body to fill in the sketch. Too much to feel and nowhere to put it all down. Their sex ed teacher calls it “going through big changes”. Their parents call it a series of growth spurts. All euphemisms for the way their shoulder blades poke out from their backs like unborn wings. 

“If you don’t get in here right now I’m going to drag you in by your ankles” Johnny threatens.

Jaehyun takes a precautionary step back, pulling his arms up against his chest. 

“It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid, you just have to do it.” 

Ultimately, it’s self-consciousness rather than boldness that pulls him into the water, worried that the other groups of hikers are jeering at the hairs that trail from his bellybutton into his swimming trunks. But Johnny cheers all the same.

There was one time back in fifth grade when Johnny had pretended his eyes were a camera shutter, closing them and storing away the image they captured. Just an experiment. It wasn’t even an important moment. His math teacher was unwrapping Easter candy from its crinkly foil, equations trailing down the whiteboard behind her like rain. Johnny had just wanted to test his memory. See if he could remember something so mundane if he was just determined enough. 

He does it again now. 

They’ll agree for years down the line that this day, on the top of this mountain, is sacred somehow. They both latch onto it and assign it the same transcendent meaning, painting over and over it with new colors until the original brushstrokes are unrecoverable. 

For now, though, they lay back on damp rock and listen to water freefalling into itself.

~*~

“I don’t know about this.” Jaehyun is looking down at the stack of papers Johnny just tossed into his lap. The page on top reads “2-Week Intensive Writing Camp” and the rest of the pages are about equally as scary. They talk about workshops and live readings and Jaehyun is definitely not interested in making a fool of himself, thanks. It’s the summer before they start high school, and Jaehyun has enough on his mind already. 

Johnny went to this camp last year and came back raving about it to Jaehyun. It’s less about the writing than it is about the people, he says. Jaehyun will admit that he is a little intrigued when Johnny keeps getting handwritten letters in the mail deep into the winter, postmarks from far away friends. 

He gives in, because he always gives in to Johnny. 

They tell Yuta he should come along, but he just shakes his head sadly. His missed assignments have built up to a point where he has to retake civics during the summer. The best he can do is send them both letters so they’ll have something from home when the counselors distribute the mail and text them as often as he can in between dull essays on the branches of government. 

The camp is held on a university campus a few hours south, a big, sprawling place stacked with Georgian architecture. Magnolia trees droop in the wet, stagnant heat and cicadas’ songs crescendo from their hidden perches. 

They lug their suitcases out of the back of their parents’ cars, up the stairs of their assigned dorm building, and into their tiny shared room. It’s just a couple of lofted beds, a couple of poorly-built dressers, and a bunch of cinderblocks painted white. They both think that if this is the living situation they have to look forward to in college, they’re going to save their money up for an apartment. 

The building is bustling with counselors in matching shirts, parents bidding their nervous children goodbye. Johnny and Jaehyun stay in their room until the activity dies down, unpacking and speculating about the glimpses they catch of the other boys living on their hall. 

Later that night, they’re all herded into an alcove in the hallway to play uncomfortable icebreakers. They blink up at the counselor orchestrating the whole harrowing affair, willing time to speed up and rescue them from the exertion of thinking up fun facts about themselves. Time does not, in fact, speed up, but the games at least teach Johnny and Jaehyun that they’ll be living with pleasant people.

They play a game of charades, pulling emotions out of a hat and trying to make the others guess them by the expressions on their faces. One boy – Johnny thinks his name is Taeil – selects his paper, unfolds it, and proceeds to just stare steadily ahead, wiggling his eyebrows and barely suppressing a smile. He applauds himself, even when everyone stares in bewilderment, no guesses on the tips of their tongues. Johnny likes him right away. 

Turns out, Taeil is one part of a package deal, much like Johnny and Jaehyun. He came to camp with Taeyong, his best friend from home. They live a town away from the university, and they know which shops and restaurants are the best for when the counselors turn them all loose for afternoon breaks on the main street of the college town. 

One of the first things that strikes Johnny and Jaehyun is how sensitive Taeil and Taeyong can be. Johnny caught Taeil with tears in his eyes after they watched Rent one movie night. “I just like happy endings, OK?” Taeil swatted Johnny’s arm away, embarrassed and pink-faced. 

Taeyong is prone to tears too; he picks up the feelings of everyone around him and holds them tight until they feel like they were his to begin with. He gets misty when Johnny talks about how his grandma has been getting sicker and frailer lately, and he feels bad for spending all this time away from home. When Jaehyun gets overwhelmed by the crowds in town, Taeyong knows instinctively, links their elbows together so he has an anchor in the chaos.

The four of them stick together, claiming a couple of couches in the common room as their own. Their friendship is easy and natural, like it’s been built up for years instead of days. Something about the sweetness in the air, the poems in their ears, ties them together with neat stitches.

For most of them, the classes they’re taking are secondary to the time they spend with each other, when the day’s schedule is loose enough for them to settle in together. 

Taeyong doesn’t have much interest in the class he’s taking on preparing college application essays. That’s all too far in the future for him to take seriously yet. Instead, he puts his energy into writing songs to play on the ukulele when everyone is gathered together, done for the day at dusk. They all agree that Taeyong has a talent for writing lyrics, but he always passes them off to Taeil, preferring to hear his soothing croon overlaying the chords he plucks.

Jaehyun, on the other hand, surprises himself with how focused he becomes on writing. During breakfasts in the dining hall, he types furiously on his laptop, working to perfect his assignments before he goes to class. He doesn’t volunteer to share his work aloud, but he does bask in the positive comments instructors write in the margins. He writes little snippets of short fiction, using his old flair for story-telling to put his tales on paper. He’s always been observant, and it feels good to make his perceptions external, documented and preserved rather than lost to the whims of his mind.

Johnny is proud of them all. He thinks Jaehyun’s stories and Taeyong’s songs and Taeil’s voice are more than just silly hobbies. They all downplay their own talents, pull faces when anyone pays them compliments. But Johnny knows he can see more clearly than they can. 

~*~

It's late and they’re playing a game of Never Have I Ever, substituting shots with gulps of cherry soda. Jaehyun is laid up in bed with a nasty migraine and Johnny sits dubiously in a circle with Taeil, Taeyong, and a few other kids from their hall. 

It’s been tame so far; he’s just learned that most of them have never smoked or snuck into a movie. They’re snacking on candy from the vending machine down the hall, unconcerned with the summer storm brewing outside. 

Then Taeyong says “never have I ever kissed someone.” 

Johnny isn’t sure whether to drink. He’s thinking about the grape Yuta chased out of his mouth with his tongue, the twist in his gut when he lay feet away from Jaehyun and Yuta kissing for real. He’s also thinking about the glimmers of difference he’s felt in himself lately, the thoughts about other boys in his grade he’s pushed away so violently, so dismissively. He weighs the situation carefully, looking around the group for some sign of intolerance tucked away in the features of his friends’ faces. 

He drinks. 

Taeil’s eyes widen in curiosity. “Oh, you’ve never told us about that. What was her name?”

Johnny is panicking. He thinks about lying, then remembers how bad Jaehyun says he is at lying, then settles resignedly into the truth. “Uh. It was actually a guy.” 

“That’s cool. What was his name?” 

Johnny can’t believe it’s as simple as that. No one is looking at him with any malice. No one even seems fazed. He knows for sure now that this is a refuge, that these people are gentle. 

“Yuta.” 

“Yuta,” Taeil repeats. “Are you guys together?” 

“Nah, we’re just friends. He’s cool.” 

“We should meet him sometime,” Taeyong suggests. “We’ll come visit you and Jaehyun after camp and we can all hang out.” 

Johnny thinks this is a great idea, and he tells Taeyong so. He feels warm all over, legs kicked up into Taeyong’s lap, more comfortable than should be possible on the hard hallway floor. 

That moment is a kind of catharsis. It gives Johnny permission to consciously consider he feels, rather than burying it facedown, leaving the truth claustrophobic and gasping for air.

Impossibly, the two weeks burst something open between Johnny and Jaehyun too. They thought they were as close as they could be, but something about this place brings them to tell each other things they haven’t even quite come to terms with themselves. 

They spend late nights awake together, heads cradled by worn pillows, facing each other in the dark on opposite sides of their little room. They trace the slices of light that come through the blinds from the quad outside, the wall rough against their fingertips. 

There’s a boy in the group a year above them who performs poems every afternoon, no sign of anxious tremors in his hands. Johnny is in a class with him in the afternoon and he spends the whole hour admiring the way he talks about the chapbooks their instructor assigns and the way his pen never stops moving during free writes. Johnny sits a couple seats down from him every day, snatching glances at the slope of his nose in profile and counting the mosquito bites on his arms. He tells Jaehyun about this. He can’t summon the courage to use the word crush and he definitely isn’t ready to issue any ultimatums on what all of this means about himself. He feels like Yuta, dancing around the g-word on the phone all those months ago. 

Jaehyun listens silently. He can hear the way Johnny’s voice is rattling in his throat, can see the silhouette of his hand dragging tensely across the wall. He doesn’t interrupt, just lets Johnny do his best to gouge the words out of himself where they’ve sat rigid and dormant for too long.

Johnny’s just finished a spiel about how cute it is that the guy always has ink staining his hands when Jaehyun finally interjects. 

“You know I love you a lot, right?” 

Johnny’s hand stills in its nervous ministrations on the dorm room wall. 

Jaehyun turns onto his side to face Johnny, the weak light casting him in watery gold. “I would never judge you. I don’t know what you’re going to decide about all of this,” he waves his hand vaguely, “or if you’re going to decide anything at all. But I’ll always be here.” 

Jaehyun always has the perfect thing to say. It knocks Johnny’s breath out.

“I’ve been thinking about that kind of stuff too lately anyway,” Jaehyun continues. “There’s a guy in my short fiction class who’s kind of cute.” He shrugs, considering. “We’ll figure it out.”

And, for the first time, Johnny believes that.


	3. Chapter 3

Their camp friends really do visit after the summer’s end. Johnny has heard all the cautionary tales about friends drifting apart, about how it’s just part of growing up. There’s still a bitter taste in his mouth from when his mom had smiled sympathetically at him as he told her about the plans they’d all made and asked if he could offer up their guest room. Everyone seems to have reached a collective conclusion that friendships cultivated over the course of two weeks are doomed before they even start in earnest. But Johnny and Jaehyun both know this is different.

It’s a stormy day when Taeyong and Taeil arrive; the sky churns with unshed rain. Taeyong’s used car stands out stark and bright red against the gray of the pavement and the clouds. Johnny and Jaehyun sit staring out the window at the front of Jaehyun’s house, unable to feign calm in the minutes leading up to their friends’ arrival. They still can’t quite believe it’s actually happening. They won’t believe it until they see the car scrape up against the curb and see Taeil’s face pressed up against the passenger window.

The reunion is everything Johnny and Jaehyun thought it would be. They rush up to Taeyong’s car, exchange embarrassed hugs, and show Taeil and Taeyong all the places that make up the little world they both revolve around. Moons to their own green and blue earth, sharp edges sanded down.

It’s October, but the air is lush when it jumbles their hair through the rolled-down windows. Taeyong drives nervously, like a mother in a minivan packed with children. Johnny sits shotgun, directing him through the routes he’s taken since he was a chubby infant in a carseat.

The radio jockey shouts, an undercurrent beneath their excited chatter. When they pull up outside Johnny and Jaehyun’s high school, Taeyong puts the car in park, and yanks up the emergency brake too (just in case).

“So, this is it,” Taeil says.

It’s dark by now, the only light harsh and artificial, covering the school building in a casing of unreality. The parking lot is empty except for them.

Jaehyun answers, “this is it.” He’s whispering but he’s not sure why. It feels like if he speaks up, school security will come running up to the car, beating their meaty fists against the windows.

Johnny has the same feeling, but he speaks at full volume anyway, defiant and little spiteful.

“I hate this fucking place.” A few weeks ago, he and Jaehyun talked about sneaking up to this building in ski masks to spray paint the generic brick. They feel invisible here most days, and it makes them hurt in a vengeful, throbbing kind of way. They would never do it, but it makes them feel better to talk about it. To imagine what would happen if they made themselves impossible to ignore.

Taeyong doesn’t hesitate when Johnny tells him to keep driving. They’re all eager to leave.

The next stop is Yuta’s house. Johnny and Jaehyun had talked about him every day they were at camp and shared the funniest lines from the letters he’d sent. Taeyong and Taeil are both a little jumpy and shy around new people, but the curiosity outweighs the uncertainty. They want to put a face to the letters, to the story Johnny told about the first person he ever kissed.

Yuta walks up to the car in no hurry, hood pulled up and hair falling into his eyes. Taeil catches himself tensing up where he sits in the tiny middle part of the backseat, suddenly conscious of the fact that he would be pressed arm to arm against a stranger.

Yuta slides in, characteristically unbothered. He pulls his hood down and pushes his hair back and Taeil and Taeyong get their first good glimpse of him in the neighborhood streetlights.

“Hey.” Yuta turns to Taeil beside him, and when he flashes a smile, they all know they’ll be just fine.

“I’m Yuta. I’ve heard so much about you both I feel like we’re already friends.”

Taeyong cranes his head back from the driver’s seat and says “we are,” shoulders shaking with a silent, nervous giggle.

After that, the layer of anticipation is broken. Yuta has a quiet way of making people feel like they’ve never not known him. He cuts through the introductory rituals, the stilted etiquette, and skips to the loyalty.

Yuta lets about two radio songs go by before he pipes up “oh my god, please don’t make me listen to this.” Instead, he passes Taeyong a CD to feed to his car’s stereo. It’s all rhythmic, plucky bass lines and wailing vocals on their way to their next stop.

They pull up in the parking lot of a church. It’s a spot at the top of a hill where the whole of Jaehyun and Johnny’s town is visible; a sprawl of light like a handful of tossed jacks.

Taeil peers through the space between Johnny and Taeyong in the front seat. “Damn, your town is kind of pretty.”

Jaehyun snorts. “Anything could look pretty if you look at it from far enough away.”

No one disagrees.

Taeyong clears his throat. He speaks into the silence, "so I hear you're like a music expert, Yuta."

Yuta flushes, leaning further back into the shadows of the backseat. 

"I wouldn't say that." 

"Oh come on," Taeil chimes in. "Johnny and Jaehyun played your mixes all the time at camp, you've got a good ear."

"Maybe, but I can't play for shit." 

"Do you have a guitar?" Taeil asks. "I'm no Hendrix, but I can try to give you a couple tips while I'm here." 

Yuta perks up. "Yeah, dude, that'd be amazing. It's just been sitting in my room for like months." 

Taeyong laughs, "I can't wait to have two guitar players to test out my songs on." 

"Please, I wouldn't want to butcher your music." 

Johnny twists his neck around to share a smug look with Jaehyun. They knew their friends would get along. It's gratifying to see their two worlds blend so smoothly; summer meeting fall. It makes them feel essential, like they're the frame holding everything together.

They all pile out of the car to get a better look at the view, bodies pressed up against the wooden fence that separates the parking lot from the steep slope below. From far away, they're just a handful of silhouettes. Paper dolls easily peeled away from the backdrop of night. From far away, Johnny and Jaehyun's town is just a benign smattering of light.

~*~

Jaehyun’s mom greets them all at the door and herds them into the kitchen for dinner, ever-hospitable and borderline overbearing.

They spend their night in sleeping bags on Jaehyun’s basement floor. They halfheartedly try to pick a movie, then try to find something on cable, but eventually they give up and just spend the night talking and playing video games.

There’s something about the feeling in the room that plants Johnny at the border between fear and excitement. It’s the feeling of possibility. The knowledge that there are unspoken secrets between them all, suspended like cobwebs in the corners of the room. He wants them to ask him questions, but he’s not sure which ones, and he’s not sure what the answers are.

This is the same basement where he held his own mouth open for Yuta’s tongue. He still feels as clumsy as he did then, full of forbidden feeling.

It's late at night, pushing two in the morning. Some video game is getting increasingly competitive, Johnny’s friends getting louder and rowdier while he and Taeyong watch from a safe distance.

“So, what’s been up lately?” Taeyong asks.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Taeyong shrugs. “It’s just kind of hard to get important life updates when we only usually talk over text, you know?”

Johnny hums. “Yeah, sorry I’m not the best texter. I just forget to respond all the time.”

“No, I get that,” Taeyong nods. He pauses before he continues. “So, what’s the update? Any major developments in the romance department?” Taeyong juts an elbow into Johnny’s side, tone teasing.

Johnny freezes a little. “Mm. Not really.” Johnny picks at a hangnail on his thumb, but he can feel Taeyong’s gaze on him, still expectant. “Uh, there’s a girl in my world history class, I guess she’s kind of cute.”

The real story is that there’s a girl who sits behind him in second period and sometimes asks to borrow his pencils. One of her friends had come up to him earlier that year and asked if he liked her. She’d been thinking about asking him to homecoming, and her friends took it upon themselves to do some investigating before she formally asked. In a panic, Johnny told her friend to let her know that he was going to be out of town the night of the homecoming dance. To this day, he spends second period with his whole body tensed, fearful that she'll ask him out anyway.

Taeyong looks at him doubtfully. “Wow, that’s cool…”

“But?” Johnny prompts, defensive.

“Nah, nothing. Just. You know. Do you like her?”

“You _know_? What do you mean, you _know_? She’s nice, I don’t get what you’re trying to say.”

“You know you don’t have to lie to me, right?”

Johnny’s hit with hot, needling fear. He’s not sure why this should be such a big deal. Yuta’s been out for ages, and everyone here has been nothing but supportive. Not to mention that Taeyong already knows about the time he kissed Yuta.

But something about this conversation is too close to the heart of the issue. It feels like Taeyong can see all the times he watched the way Taeil’s hands handle a guitar, or thought too long about the too-tight jeans Yuta likes to wear. It’s too much, too close.

He’s not exactly surprised that Taeyong already knows. Taeyong is perceptive; he notices things about people without them needing to say it. And Johnny knows that Taeyong is quiet about these things. He keeps everyone’s secrets.

Something in Johnny deflates. He’s tired. Tired of being wary around the people he loves most, avoiding discussions that cut too close to the bone.

Johnny takes a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you’re right. You’re right.”

Taeyong’s face softens. “Johnny.”

Johnny doesn’t even need to say it outright; it’s already there.

“Sorry.” Johnny’s voice is wobbly. “Sorry I’m making such a big deal out of it, it’s like. Stupid.”

“Johnny, stop. It is a big deal and it’s scary and I’m so proud of you, okay? You’re an amazing friend and an amazing person and I’m so proud. And that’s all there is to it.”

After Taeyong knows, telling the rest of them is easy. It’s right before they all go to sleep, when the TV is off and the lights are dim. He says it outright this time.

Taeil asks “what were you and Taeyong talking about that was so serious?”

Laying on his back, Johnny manages to summon a little smile, says to the ceiling “I’m gay.”

Suddenly, everybody knows. And somehow, everything is okay.

~*~

Taeil and Taeyong are only in town for a couple more days. They make the most of it and do their best to ignore the feeling of impending loss lingering like mist among them. It’s the same feeling you get on Sunday nights; the feeling that your happiness is temporary.

Taeil patiently teaches Yuta some chords on his guitar. It’s gathered an actual layer of dust from sitting in his room, Youtube tutorials and Google searches abandoned out of frustration.  

They take a couple more joyrides in Taeyong’s car, getting cheap fast food and wiping grease on the seats when Taeyong isn’t looking.

The whole town feels emptier when Taeyong and Taeil are gone. It felt like they only got to spend a moment all together. They want to stretch that moment as far as it will go, but it has to dissolve, like sugar in water. Nothing but sweetness left behind.

~*~

When junior year arrives, so does the pressure. Even summer isn’t allowed to be lazy anymore.

First comes New York state. Jaehyun doesn’t remember much at all about the college he and Johnny visited. He’s not even sure of the college’s name. He just remembers sharing a room with Johnny all those muggy summer nights, moths beating irregular rhythms against the window screen.

He remembers the lake where his family rented a house. The dragonflies that landed on his arms whenever he sat still.

They spend their afternoons listening to old Bob Dylan CDs and reading every book from their collections besides the ones their English teachers put on their summer reading lists.

It’s like their lives run in circles, repeating themselves. Jaehyun’s reluctance to jump in the water at the end of a hike becomes reluctance to plunge into lake water. Their late-night talks at camp become late-night talks under the covers of another unfamiliar bed, lake lapping silent where they can’t see.

One night, they’re awake deep into the night, testing how loudly they can laugh without waking the whole house.

“So, what’d you think of the campus today?” Johnny asks.

Jaehyun is burrowed down in the blankets, face half peeking out to catch a dusting of the nighttime chill.

He answers, shrugs, “I don’t know. It just didn’t click.”

The school was rolling and green; students on bicycles and buildings with rickety floors. 

"I felt like I was in a brochure for a college, not an actual college, you know?" 

"Yeah I get that." Johnny turns on his side to face Jaehyun, hands tucked beneath the pillow. "Do you know what you want to do yet?" 

Jaehyun heaves a sigh.

"That's the thing. I feel like I want to do everything but also nothing at the same time. Like I look at these schools' lists of majors and I'm kind of interested in a ton of them but I can't picture myself  _actually_  doing one of them." 

Johnny looks down. "You're smart, I know you'll be good no matter what you do." 

Jaehyun considers him for a moment. The house is quiet. He breathes a laugh that's more like just an exhale.

"Thanks. What do you want to do?"

"Creative writing," Johnny answers immediately, like he's had the answer prepared for a long time. "You could do it too, it'd be just like camp."

Jaehyun wrinkles his nose. "Nah, I'm not good enough at it for all of that."

"Well I think you are, but whatever. I guess we don't have to know yet anyway."

"Kinda feels like we do." 

Johnny says “we’ll figure it out.” The same words Jaehyun said to him in their dorm room at summer camp.

"I know," Jaehyun murmurs, tucking his lower lip beneath his teeth. "Thanks."

Johnny grins, "don't thank me, you're the one who said it first." 

"No, for - just for being there." 

~*~

They were all warned that the last dregs of high school would drain away fast, and they do. Before long they're timidly asking teachers for letters of recommendation and piecing together lists of extracurricular activities. 

Taeil applies to a couple faraway music conservatories, Johnny applies to some big creative writing programs out in the Midwest, but they secretly have a master plan.

There's a state school a few hours' drive from where Johnny, Jaehyun, and Yuta live, and a few hours away from Taeyong and Taeil on the other side of the state. It's big, and it has departments for just about every subject they can think of. They all apply.

It's a secretive thing, like they're breaking some unwritten social code. Jaehyun mentions it to Johnny, who brings a brochure to school for Yuta, who emails Taeyong a link to the music department's website, who forwards it to Taeil. They don't tell their parents they're applying and they don't talk much about their applications, even to each other.

It feels like a pipe dream they shouldn't entertain, unless they want to be scolded like children. 

People in the movies talk about college like it should be a new life, anything you bring with you a mark of stunted growth. But none of them want to discard each other. They want everything: a new setting, new challenges, new passions, new friends. And old friends too.

Taeyong gets his acceptance letter first. He's been checking the mail compulsively for weeks, disappointed every day all he sees are bills addressed to his parents. But today there's a big envelope addressed to him. 

His heart transitions clumsily from its calm rhythm to rattle erratically in his chest. He hurries inside, leaving the rest of the mail in the mailbox. He takes a picture and sends it to the group chat with a text:

**Taeyong** : " _go home Now_ " 

**Jaehyun** : " _!!!!!_ "

**Yuta** : " _shit_ "

**Taeil** : " _shit_ "

**Johnny** : " _shit_ " 

It takes awhile for everyone to get home from school and check their mailboxes, but not as long as it usually would. Johnny's vaguely concerned one of them will be arrested for reckless driving. 

Now Johnny, Jaehyun, and Yuta all sit in a circle on Yuta's bedroom floor with Taeyong and Taeil on Facetime. Everyone’s letters sit in front of them, almost like they're afraid to touch them. They hope it's a good sign that all their envelopes look the same.

"Who's going first?" Taeil asks.

"All of us," Jaehyun suggests.

They all tear open their envelopes at the same time. It feels like the moment itself is holding its breath.

Johnny starts laughing the moment all the paper is torn away. They all have identical folders with "welcome" written across the front in bold letters.

Jaehyun looks at Johnny clutching his stomach, giddy with relief, and he doesn't think he's ever felt so grateful.

"This is really happening, you guys." Taeyong announces, mostly to himself.

"I can't believe I actually got in" Yuta says, incredulous. He's holding his folder up to the light the same way cashiers check for counterfeit bills.

Yuta's acceptance isn't as close a call as he thinks it is. His apathy toward worksheets and lab reports was beaten by his passionate desire to not spend a single extra moment in high school. He doesn't want to be the one left behind sending letters to his friends again. Ever since the five of them spent time together, he'd been holding the thought of togetherness in his mind, treating school like a step toward something better. He still doesn't like it, but he at least skims books before class discussions and tries to memorize formulas the night before math tests. And now it's paid off.

They don't waste time breaking the news to their parents and signing their commitment letters. They've done their research, and it's a good school, and their parents concede.

Now, they wait for everything to change.

 


End file.
